The Brief

 

In our office and in many other small to large businesses there was a common problem which really annoyed us around booking a meeting room. Due to the lack of rooms, in most cases it’s first come first serve or book rooms via Google Calendar and hope people would check before walking in and claiming the room. We wanted to create our own solution to this problem. The idea was that if this was successful the owner of the ‘Meth Lab’ (Innovation Team) Danny Dagan would launch a version to white label & sell to other medium to large business internationally.

 
 

The Current Experience

 
 
 

I interviewed a few people in the office who worked in different departments to get an idea of their problems with the current system & also to get an understanding of the kind of features that would most benifit them for this minimal viable product.

 
 
 

I find it really annoying that we book a room and get kicked out because a Head of Department or CEO needs the room, it feels really unprofessional especially when we have clients coming in.

 
 
 

It is quite annoying not having the same equipment in every meeting room. Knowing what each room has would be incredibly useful, especially in emergencies (For client demos)

 
 
 

It would be great to have the ability to quickly book a room if it looks free when walking past.

 
 
 

It really stresses me out when people book meeting rooms but don’t actually bother updating the google calendar sheet.

 
 

Direct/In-Direct Competitor Analysis

 
 
 
 

Calendars by Readdle

I started with some direct & indirect competitor analysis, looking into calendar apps and booking apps. I found Calendars by Readdle which had a very simple UI. I found it quite interesting the way they displayed the weeks and months. The way they structured the screen to allow more focus on the content was really nice.

 
 
 
 

Sunrise

Sunrise was another quite popular app on the appstore, has a gorgeous UI. Allows user to view the week that they are on along with quick access to select a day in the following week. The default view has thecurrent day selected with a visual timeline of your day ready for the user to browse.

 
 
 
 

CAL

CAL was probably my favourite of all the apps I had found. Very clean and intiutive design. Similar to the Sunrise app, gives you access to the full week with a brief summary of what the user. Uses horizontal swipe gestures to navigate between the days, with really nice transitions between the days.

 
 
 
 

Grid Diary

Grid Diary was more focused on making data input for days a lot more easier. Giving the user options to select from to make it easier to remember what they did and focus on what they are keeping track of. Kept a clean UI, but didn’t have any gesture based controls so it felt quite limited compared to the other apps out there.

 
 
 
 

PEEK

Peek is more focused on the tech savvy target audience. There are no buttons or navigation controls visible on the app. It relies heavily on gesture based controls and works beautifully. Uses simple bars to indicate how busy each day is. Having no clutter on the screen makes it so much easier to focus on what the user wants to do.

 
 
 

Most apps/products/services fail because there is no clear understanding of why they do the things they do. I believe this apps main purpose is to make viewing and booking a meeting room as intuitive & delightful as possible.

 

Key Features

 
 

UX Flowcharts

 

From the research gathered I began generating ideas for the individual features & created flow charts for each one, gradually adding/amending it until it formed a more complete flow diagram.

 

Wireframes

User Interface

I moved on to creating the pixel perfect user interface, focusing on making sure that the gesture controls, touch area, button states, navigation & notifications were all mocked up. My main intention was to keep the design as simple as possible with matt colours to indicate where potential clients could use their branding.

 
 
 
 
 

Interactive Prototype

 
 
 

Invision is a fantastic tool to help designers create interactive prototypes, to test and validate design decisions and make amendments where needed. I used all the UI screens to create a beautiful prototype to test with user & iterate, before hand off to developers.

 

Animation (Added Value)


I read a lot into emotional design and found that small subtle animations play a big part in an apps sucess. I created the small animation below to automatically play when a user books a room. For the next release of the application, I would like to include more custom animations to add value to the whole experience.